Atul Kumar Anjaan: The Kisan Revolutionary Who Drew a Red Line at C2+50%
Two years after his death, the communist leader’s ghost still haunts India’s farm policy — a road that runs from the Swaminathan Commission report to the Delhi protest sites.
By Rajan Kshirsagar AIKS | May 2, 2026
New Delhi — On the morning of 3 May 2024, a lanky 69-year-old man who had spent half his life inside jail cells and the other half inside government committee rooms finally let go. Atul Kumar Anjaan, General Secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha and the face of the radical Kisan Movement died in Lucknow after a long duel with cancer. Tributes poured in from across the ideological divide: from Sitaram Yechury, his comrade of fifty years, to Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, who remembered their Lucknow University days. Yet the most powerful testament to Anjaan was not in the obituaries but in the fields where farmers, two years later, still chant a formula he embedded in the national consciousness: C2+50% for MSP with Legal Gurantee.
If that formula — a Minimum Support Price set at comprehensive cost of production plus 50 per cent — now sounds like common sense to crores of farmers and cultivators, it is because Anjaan spent decades turning a technocratic recommendation into a mass slogan. He was the only farmers’ representative on the historic Swaminathan Commission, a part-time member with a full-time passion, who refused to let its findings gather dust in the corridors of power. His life story is not merely an account of one communist’s journey; it is a window into how policy can become protest, and protest can become policy.
The student revolutionary
Anjaan was born on 28 April 1955 in Lucknow, into a home where rebellion was the family inheritance. His father, Dr Ayodhya Prasad Singh, was a freedom fighter who had joined the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association the radical group of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad and endured prolonged imprisonment under the British. The boy grew up breathing that air of defiance.
At Lucknow University, a young Atul Kumar Singh acquired the name “Anjaan” — the stranger, the unknown one even as he became anything but unknown. His oratory was surgical, his reach magnetic. He was elected President of the Lucknow University Students’ Union four consecutive times, a record that still stands. By age 20, he was presiding over the National College Students’ Union. In 1979, the All India Students Federation, made him its National President, a post he held for seven years.
It was the 1973 Police-PAC revolt in Uttar Pradesh, however, that marked Anjaan’s baptism by fire. Thousands of armed constables, chafing under caste discrimination, meagre pay and humiliating service conditions, rose in revolt. Anjaan, barely out of his teens, emerged as a principal leader of that uprising. For his pains, he would clock a cumulative four years and nine months in prison — a sentence he wore like a badge of honour.
Building a red fortress among peasants
By the 1990s, Anjaan was a fixture in the CPI’s highest organs. He joined the National Executive in 1992 and the National Secretariat in 1995, eventually becoming General Secretary of the party. But his true laboratory lay elsewhere in the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), the peasant front founded in 1936. Elected General Secretary of the AIKS at its Thrissur conference in 1997, he would go on to lead the organisation for 27 years, until his death.
What set Anjaan apart from many Left leaders was his polyglot ease. Fluent in half a dozen languages, he could walk into a paddy field in Andhra Pradesh, a sugarcane cooperative in Maharashtra, or a cotton farm in Punjab and speak to farmers in their own tongue. This was not tokenism; it was reconnaissance. Long before the term “agrarian crisis” entered drawing-room discourse, Anjaan was documenting the human debris of liberalisation: the suicides in Vidarbha, the debt traps in Telangana, the desertion of farming by a generation.
A farmer inside the Swaminathan Commission
That fieldwork became a national asset in 2004 when the UPA government, frightened by the spate of farmer suicides, set up the National Commission on Farmers under Prof. M.S. Swaminathan. The Commission’s eight members were a mixed bag of agricultural scientists, economists and administrators. Atul Kumar Anjaan, appointed as a member, He was the only one who did not just study farming he lived its politics.
Inside the Commission, Anjaan sharpened two arguments relentlessly. First, that price was the pivot. The existing Minimum Support Price, fixed by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, was a charade; farmers were being paid prices that did not even cover their full costs of cultivation, let alone their labour. Second, that the state had to intervene on a war footing through guaranteed procurement, slashed interest rates on crop loans, and a national insurance scheme that actually worked.
The Commission’s final report, submitted in October 2006, reflected these concerns. Its headline recommendation that MSP should be at least C2 (comprehensive cost) plus 50 per cent was not invented by Anjaan, but he was its most relentless populariser. In an exclusive interview with Hindustan Times in September 2006, he previewed the panel’s thinking: overhaul the “dated” pricing mechanism, fix crop loans at 4 per cent interest, set up state-level farmers’ commissions chaired by farmers themselves. “Not implementing these recommendations,” he would later thunder, “is tantamount to criminal negligence.”
After the Commission, Anjaan became its shadow. He hounded the Manmohan Singh government for burying the report. At a rally in Andhra Pradesh in 2009, he estimated that even implementing half the recommendations would solve 70 per cent of farmers’ problems. As recently as 2017, at the height of renewed farm distress, he repeated that line with undiminished fury.
The mantle of a national movement
When the Modi government pushed through three Black farm laws in September 2020, Anjaan was among the first to seize their deeper logic. “These bills will completely stop government procurement of crops,” he warned. “Private mandis will replace the state. Price security for peasants will end.” The clarity of that warning that the laws were not about deregulation but about dismantling the architecture of MSP — became the ideological engine of the year-long protest that followed.
He relentlessly worked to carry forward the farmers unity despite diffrences & diffrent shades of Ideology. His efforts along with all prominant leaders shaped the Sanyukt Kisan Morcha. Which forced BJP to withdraw three black farm laws. Inside the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, the umbrella coalition of farm unions that led the protests on Delhi’s borders, Anjaan was a steadying hand. He believed in “issue-based unity” a tactical alliance among forces otherwise divided by party and ideology. His old friend Sitaram Yechury recalled that Anjaan was “instrumental in maintaining the cohesion of the Morcha”, even as some of organisations grumbled about sharing platforms with groups they considered politically unreliable. For Anjaan, the peasantry’s survival was more important than the anyones’s purity.
The communist who never stopped
Anjaan’s politics never fit easily into a newspaper headline. He was a revolutionary who could quote Lenin as easily as he could recite Urdu poetry. He saw land reform not as a relic of the 1950s but as unfinished business, and threw himself into the Bhumi Adhikar Andolan’s successful resistance against the 2015 Land Acquisition Ordinance. He was a fierce critic of communalism, refusing to allow the farmers’ movement to be fractured along religious lines.
Even the cancer that consumed his body could not silence him. From his hospital bed, in March 2024, he dictated a message to the Kisan Mazdoor Mahapanchayat in Delhi: “A clarion call for all to unite against the Narendra Modi-led BJP Government.” A few weeks later, he was ad.
A legacy written in the soil
Walk through any protest site where farmers have gathered today be it at the Shambhu border or a district collectorate in Maharashtra and you will hear the formula “Swaminathan Commission, C2+50%”. It has been scraped onto tractors, painted on dhotis, woven into songs. It is not a demand that belongs to the Left alone anymore; it has been taken up by unions of every stripe, some of them ideologically far removed from Anjaan’s Marxism.
That transformation from a commission’s paragraph to a people’s slogan is Atul Kumar Anjaan’s greatest gift. He showed that a communist need not be an outsider barking at the state; he can enter the state’s own institutions, extract the sharpest possible tools, and then hand them back to the people who need them most. In a country where the fence around policymaking remains absurdly high, Anjaan breached it with the force of his own life experience. He was not a think-tank professional who “discovered” farmers; he was a farmer’s son, a jail-going student leader, a man who had sat through innumerable panchayat meetings in the dust, who then walked into a government commission and refused to speak any language other than that of the fields.
Two years after his death, the Indian state still has not fully implemented the Swaminathan Commission’s recommendations. But as long as farmers know what they are owed — and are willing to fight for it Atul Kumar Anjaan has not lost. The stranger is gone, but his slogan remains, as red and as stubborn as ever. To carry forward his legacy and mass movement for legal gurantee of MSP with formula C2+50% will be true homage to him. AIKS shall put all its effrort to make Atulkumars slogan as a reality.
Rajan Kshirsagar
President All India Kisan sabha
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